Actually I asked one of the TiVo engineers about that, kukrer.. The answer is that yes they do have utilities this advanced.. It's called MFS Tools. I think TiVo employees accounts for about half the CDs picked up at the BBQ.

ALanJay,
I honestly don't know. I would assume any TiVo that had 2 drives when it got 2.5.5 and the new background animation. If you already have a working backup, you can skip the making a backup step.. The steps for saving your recordings don't have a difference.

I suspect I know the answer to this question, but I might as well ask.

If you have an added B drive, then later use mfsadd to add a larger A drive, can you revert back to your original A without restoring from backup? Is there anything changed on the old B drive that would prevent it from working with the old A drive? Clearly you would lose some recordings, I'm just wondering if it would work.

Edit: I thought about this a little harder, and realized at least one reason why it wouldn't work: the old drive wouldn't have the propper index of all the shows on the new B drive. Duh.

I have an original 30gb SA tivo. I upgraded it to 60gb then added an 80Gb some time ago. I now have 38hrs Best and 141hrs Standard . Is that the correct times I should have? Seems a little low acording to other posts. Both Samsung 5400 RPM drives.

I do get several recordings that start off stuttering for the first 10 minuits or so then clear up. The picture and audio freezes, sometimes the picture gets out of sink with the audio on the stutter. I do have a 60GB IBM 7200 RPM drive I could put in place of one of them.

I've just read all of the MFS Tools 2.0 documentation and noticed the -p option for restore described as:

Attempt to optimize the partition layout for TiVo's access patterns. This will imitate the partition layout of DirecTV TiVo receivers and newer standalone receivers. The partition layout of the first drive will be such that the application data will be in the middle of the drive and the video on the outside, causing the head to have to seek less.

Click to expand...

I don't know if this is new in MFS Tools 2.0, but I know I never used this option nor did I ever see it mentioned in the Hinsdale tome.

Is there any reason that I should re-restore a drive on a DTiVo that was restored originally without the -p option? Would this have an observable effect to the user of the TiVo?

klyde, are you saying that you upgraded the A drive to 60gb with TiVoMad, then later blessed and added a B drive? If so then definately re-do it.. Upgrading a second time with a blessed drive never works. Sometimes it looks like it does, but it doesn't really.

kenr, no idea if it makes a difference. TiVo started themselves doing something similar on new systems, and so I made guesses about why and made code to act in a similar manner.

Just last week (Thursday - Saturday, to be exact) I performed a "copy/merge" of my 80GB/40GB DirectTivo upgrade disks to a new 120GB disk using mfstools 1.0 and kept all of my recordings. No one seemed to have been aware of this possibility before (although I'm sure you were). I used the following command line:

where my old (upgraded disks) were on /dev/hdc (old master, 40gb) and /dev/hdd (old slave, 80gb) and my new disk was on /dev/hdb (I booted off of the cd on /dev/hda)

After waiting for 34.25 hours for the transfer to complete, I now have a single disk with all of my settings and recordings that seems to work just fine.

My question is, is there any reason that you know of that this disk would give me problems in the future? It seems to be structured like an original factory disk, but it reported 108 hours off the bat. All of the recordings that I've checked (I've played about 10 or so at random) work just fine. Also, it seems like I could now just bless another disk and add it in, does that sound right to you? (in which case I could have just copied the old disks to two new ones and used the new mfsadd feature in 2.0, but I digress).

Anyway, one reason I wanted to get back to one disk is to see its effect on the heat of my unit (the directivo's seem to run hot). This, in combination with a new fan, reduced my average temp from ~50c to ~42c (big improvement); I also wanted to replace my A disk which was starting to whine (it was closest to the power-supply; I think it got cooked).

I seemed to miss Ken Yeh's question.. The answer is no.. Default boot is actually no swap.

daylate,
There is absolutely no reason it will give problems. That is why MFS Tools lets you do it. However, just because you now only have one drive doesn't mean you can just bless and add a B drive. The limitation in not being able to do it has nothing to do with the lack of space or a new disk, it has to do with weather you have upgraded already. In your case, even with just the A drive (Which is the same effect BTW as if you had copied your old A to the 120 directly and used TiVoMad) you have upgraded already, and can not just bless and add a new drive. But that is what MFS Tools 2.0 is for.

I need help! I don't understand exactly how the new mfs tools 2.0 fits in with the Hinsdale how to faq....

I do not have a cdrw burner and so I am using the floppy disk method. I had already downloaded mfs tools 1.1 and copied it to my c: drive, along with TiVoMad v.3.2 on a floppy and qunlock on another floppy.

When looking at the link to download mfs tools 2.0, there was a link for CD burners with a large file size, and a 500KB file "mfstools 2.0."

Here is my stupid question, what files do I need to download and how does this fit in with the intructions on the Hinsdale faq?

Originally posted by happygolucky I need help! I don't understand exactly how the new mfs tools 2.0 fits in with the Hinsdale how to faq....

I do not have a cdrw burner and so I am using the floppy disk method. I had already downloaded mfs tools 1.1 and copied it to my c: drive, along with TiVoMad v.3.2 on a floppy and qunlock on another floppy.

When looking at the link to download mfs tools 2.0, there was a link for CD burners with a large file size, and a 500KB file "mfstools 2.0."

Here is my stupid question, what files do I need to download and how does this fit in with the intructions on the Hinsdale faq?

Thanks,

David

Click to expand...

The Hinsdale How-To with instruction and links using Mfs Tools 2.0 is here:

Tiger:
Yes. I first upgraded the 30gb to a 60gb then later blessed a 2nd 80gb drive. I got 149 hours and 38hours best. INobody will tell me if this is what a 60 and 80gb should get. It seems to be working ok. Has been for more than 6 months.

Ok, I upgraded my Series 2 60 hour last night with a new 120GB B drive... my only problem was when I booted from the CD, I got the menu, then pressed enter, and it started unpacking some stuff or something and I got an error saying "CRC Error, System Halted"... I tried burning a new disc thinking I had a bad disk and got the same error, so I tried making a floppy using the instructions in the floppy folder on the CD and when I booted to that it went into some loop with repeating numbers scrolling up the screen... The above disks were made on my Athalon XP machine running Win XP, while the drives were in my PII 400 machine running win ME... So I tried using the CD in my ME machine to create another floppy and that floppy worked. After that, the upgrade went as planned... I can understand the boot floppy that I made on an XP machine not working on an ME machine, but I don't understand why 2 seperate CD's I burned didn't work. I used Nero and burned from an image file using the wizard. Strange...

I Know this is kinda long allready, but another question, I bought my $109 120GB drive before the MFStools 2.0 were out and now I'll want to upgrade to 2x120's in the near future... will this be an easy upgrade and will I be able to keep all my recordings? Again, that'll be keeping my new B 120GB and replacing the 60GB A drive with a 120GB one. That will work fine right?

Hmm, the unit I want to upgrade has two drives: 60 GB and 45 GB, with only 30hrs used on the 45 GB master drive. I am uncertain whether or not I applied a non-standard hack to make the rest of the 45 GB drive ext2 space (/hack), but I'm fairly confident that I did. (At the time of that marriage, TiVoMad was not an option.)

I have the drives to go 120-120, and want to keep my recordings. Can I do it while getting rid of the hack partition, or do I have to keep it?

Unless your old space + 1/4 your new space is greater than 140, then you don't need to worry about swap. IE if you had 30+60 then went to 120+120 that would be 90 + 150 / 4 or 90 + 32 = 122, so swap would not be needed. But if you had 60+60 and went to 120+120 that would be 120 + 120 / 4 = 120 + 30 = 150, so more swap would be recommended.

That said, once you use the space, you can't add swap.

HTH,
The extra partitions (/hack) is ignored by MFS Tools. You can actually copy all recordings to a new pair of drives and fill them in a single command. Just follow the instructions for going from dual drive to new larger dual drive.

Tiger:
I hope you, or somebody else, can shed some light on my upgrade problem...(This is my first post, but I've been lurking for a while)

3 weeks ago, I upgraded my Dtivo to (1) 100 Gb drive, preserving recordings.
last week I bought a 120 Gb for less than the 100Gb. My original plan was to just dd from the 100 to the 120, and until I cleared my programs I was going to give up the extra 20gb.

then I read about your marvelous MFStools2.0. I thought my problems were solved! But, it didn't go so well...

I followed the instructions and tried to do the Step 10, Upgrade config. #3. It returned an error "Restore failed:Backup target not large enough for the entire backup by itself" even though my hda was a blank 120Gb and the hdc was the once upgraded 100Gb. ( The drive size were correctly reported during the os boot) I tried this from two different computers, and both with the bios autodetect on and off.

So then I tried to dd from the 100 to the 120. no problem. it boots my dtivo just like I expected it to. Then I tried to "mfsadd -x /dev/hda"

No Joy. it told me that there was no more room for partitions ( or something like that) So I did a "mfsinfo /dev/hda" it listed partitions through hda15, and said I could expand it 3 more times, but mfsadd wouldn't do it...

So then to make sure that my 120Gb drive was ok, I restored my compressed backup to it, and did a "mfsadd -x /dev/hda" and it was successful, expanding out to 126 hrs like I would expect. ( but without my recordings.)

Hopefully I have given you enough details without being confusing that you can find the path to lead me down!

Thank you in advance for your assistance,
Kevin
(Whew! I just double checked, and with all the swapping, copying, etc my 100Gb still boots my dtivo with all my recordings intact)